Two months ago, I met a man at a volunteering event in Los Angeles. Early twenties, tall and slender, he didn’t blink much, he had a lot of neck and face tattoos. Let’s call him James. We were paired, assigned to assemble boxes of food for needy families, and I asked James how his day was going.
What’s your favorite psy-op? he answered.
I paused a moment, a little startled, I said none came to mind, what were some of his?
Number one was breakfast, obviously, he said. James believed breakfast to be a scam perpetuated by Big Agriculture, Big Corn, in order to market cereal flakes to the American masses, post-WWII.
Huh, I said. How about number two?
Voting, he said.
James was a weirdo, and I love weirdos. Give me your strange, your fried, your muddled-minded, awkward types. They recharge my batteries; I can listen to weirdos all day. Weirdos’ news is not my news. Their fashion, their influences often come from sources I don’t know, which is wonderful to learn about. Humanity is so varied, but I forget that sometimes, and I love a reminder.
A few minutes later, James asked me about my preferred drinking games. I said I didn’t have any, what about him? He said a favorite was “wizard staff,” also known as “wizard towers,” a contest in which a person drank a can of beer to completion, then duct-taped a fresh can to its top, cracked open the new one and drank again, then duct-taped a third can to the top of that one, and continued. But the game required the person drinking this tower of beer to grasp it only by the bottom can, which made it increasingly more difficult, as more cans were affixed to the top, to chug. More than once, James said, he’d constructed towers as tall as his head.
We talked about politics. We talked about movies. James brought the conversation back to games—other games he liked to play included shooting fireworks at his friends, boys and girls, when everyone was bare-chested. Also, “fire boxing,” in which he and a friend would douse boxing gloves in lighter fluid, don them and ignite them, then box until one person had completely burned off the other’s T-shirt.
From William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms: “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” Well, sure. At the same time, I appreciate that idea and want to steer left—because the adage of our age, maybe many ages, says we should optimize, try to be more productive, shoot higher, but what if we focused on being odder? Toward the end of our shift, James asked what I was doing that evening, he said he and his girlfriend were throwing a party in a warehouse downtown, and I was invited—music, performance art, drugs, amateur wrestling. The theme was “vengeance,” he said, which I could interpret however I liked, as long as I interpreted it.
I said it sounded fun, unfortunately I had dinner plans with friends. Though I sincerely wished in that moment—I still wish—that I did not.
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Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. His most recent novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Titles mentioned in this newsletter are stored on a Bookshop list, which pays a small commission. For more—books, articles, etc—check out rosecransbaldwin.com
Oh, don’t worry, James’s party is still going on somewhere…
“Between truth and lies, the space is wide and grey / And in that space was the home you made.” — Youth Group, ‘Oh James’